


home is behind the world ahead

by SafelyCapricious



Series: ain't no grave can hold my body down [10]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, F/M, Hermione Granger-centric, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Time Travel, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-11
Updated: 2020-10-11
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:40:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26940793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SafelyCapricious/pseuds/SafelyCapricious
Summary: Hermione had looked the spell up when trying to find a way to destroy the horcruxes. She hadn’t planned to use it. (She’d hoped she wouldn’t have to use it.)She uses it.She’s bleeding -- so is everyone else. It’s plenty of blood to power the spell, more than enough.
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Remus Lupin, PRE SHIP - Relationship
Series: ain't no grave can hold my body down [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1950148
Comments: 17
Kudos: 145





	home is behind the world ahead

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Pippin's song in LotR because ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ 
> 
> There is going to be a second, more shippy part to this, but the demands of fictober came and I gotta get something up. So if the second half is finished during fictober it'll be added as part of a series, and if the second half is not finished during fictober it'll be added as a second chapter. Marked as complete for now since series seems possible. 
> 
> This is day 10, and fictober is finally getting to me. For prompt "stranded" allegedly. 
> 
> As always, JKR is a horrible human being/TERF pos. Trans lives matter.

Hermione had looked the spell up when trying to find a way to destroy the horcruxes. She hadn’t planned to use it. (She’d hoped she wouldn’t have to use it.)

She uses it.

She’s bleeding -- so is everyone else. It’s plenty of blood to power the spell, more than enough. The cursed wound on her arm has opened again -- which means the knife that made the mark is nearby.

She snickers to herself. Bellatrix brought a knife to a wand fight.

Harry has vanished and she can’t stop snickering -- blood loss, probably.

She draws the symbols on herself absently, like she’s watching from above, wrapped in cotton wool and warmth and she starts to walk towards the forest -- into the woods -- to Voldemort’s house she goes.

There are a few figures, in black, not bothering with masks right now, who try to stop her.

They don’t succeed.

“He’s dead, my lord,” she hears -- and there’s Harry’s crumpled form.

And the cotton wool and warmth vanishes and she’s lighting and fire and destruction and she’s saying the words and she’s going to take all of them with her and she imagines she sees Harry opening his eyes just as the explosion takes them all and it’s a nice fantasy.

And she’s dying.

Except she doesn’t.

Or maybe she does.

She wakes up in a bed, after images of the blast still floating through her vision.

And she sits up -- or she tries to sit up -- but something is wrong and --

She bursts into tears and then her mum -- _not her mum_ \-- is bustling into the room and pulling her into a cuddle and --

It’s not her mum -- or -- it’s not Jean Granger who is holding her -- which is good because her mum isn’t supposed to be dead -- but the woman -- whoever she is -- keeps saying “it’s alright, mummy’s got you,” and Hermione doesn’t know what to do with _any_ of that so she just keeps crying.

If this is the afterlife, Hermione thinks, as her chest starts to hurt from sobs, it’s rubbish.

Eventually her little body gives up and she thinks she sleeps -- or maybe she doesn’t? Can you sleep when you’re dead?

When she wakes up she’s bound and determined to get some answers.

She likes approximately none of them.

As far as the woman is concerned, Hermione is three, and her name is Virginia Hermione Mores. She has a brother, six, named Henry Autolycus Mores. Her parents are Virgil and Henrietta -- and Hermione is morbidly curious about what they would name a third child, if they have one.

They’re muggles.

Or, well, her parents certainly are. Hermione isn’t going to venture if she and her brother are -- though she will say any attempts she’s made to do magic haven’t done much of anything but give her a bit of a headache.

She’s somewhat relieved that her middle name is Hermione -- she’s not been having much luck responding to Virginia and doesn’t expect that to get better. She has a whole plan, even. It unfortunately involves waiting until they send her to primary, then coming home upset and saying she was teased about her name and insisting on being called by her middle name.

Which...Hermione to Virginia isn’t as if it would be an improvement, in terms of teasing, but kids are funny, aren’t they? She’s pretty sure she can get away with it.

Instead what happens is that Henrietta (she still can’t quite make herself think of her as _mum,_ it feels disloyal) calls her ‘Ginny’ one day -- and Hermione realizes that she’ll probably never see her Ginny again, or Harry, or Ron, or her _parents_ and she falls into hysterics.

The pillow she’s laying on explodes -- feathers going everywhere -- and the accidental magic is enough that she crashes back into reality and the hysterics stop as quickly as they came.

She’s not a muggle.

“Call me Hermione,” she says, as Henrietta (her mum now) stares at her, shocked.

“Ah, alright dear,” she says, and Hermione nods and goes back to playing with her blocks.

***

It’s the sixties.

She thinks she’s getting a handle on whatever the hell is happening and then she finds out it’s the bloody sixties.

She probably should’ve figured it out by the wallpaper and the clothes her parents wear — but she feels like she hasn’t been noticing much of anything, really and —

Surely she’s dead. Surely she’s dead and this is her purgatory because she did good, but she also kept a woman in a jar and permanently scarred a girl and --

It must be purgatory, or limbo or _something_ because it can’t actually be nineteen sixty-two.

(The fashions her mother is trying to put her in, unfortunately, tell her that it might be nineteen sixty-two in limbo.)

She thinks she might go mad -- she thinks she might be mad.

Terrible things happen to witches who meddle in time, she knows. But she’s not sure if this counts -- she didn’t _want_ to come back. She just. Did.

Or maybe she didn’t.

She’s still not convinced she’s not dead. (But part of her knows the truth and thinks her denial probably isn’t healthy and she should probably come up with a coping mechanism.)

***

She loves Henry. He reminds her of the absolute best parts of Harry and Ron (and, alright, some of the worst parts as well) but he _loves_ her so much and it’s not that her parents don’t love her but she has had parents who love her and she still feels disloyal. Like she’s replaced them even though she hadn’t wanted to and hadn’t had a choice.

She did have a choice, however, about erasing their memories and sending them off to Australia.

(When she lets herself think about it, and she very much tries not to let herself think about it, she thinks that is probably worse, from her real parents point of view, than having a second set of parents who love her. But that doesn’t make her feel any less guilty.)

But she’s never had a brother.

She’d had Ron and Harry and all the rest of the Weasley’s but -- but it isn’t the same. She’d thought it had been but -- no.

Now she has a brother. Now she knows.

And when he turns eleven -- October 11th -- and gets his letter to Hogwarts, she has a panic attack.

He’s a muggleborn in the sixties -- he’ll be a target and he doesn’t know how to defend himself and he doesn’t know anything about magic and -- he holds her and tells her it’s going to be okay. He thinks she’s panicking about him leaving -- going to school somewhere else, or maybe about the magic.

Because he doesn’t know that he’s about to enter a world that’s on the brink of war -- or maybe is already there? (She tries, desperately, to remember when things started getting serious in the first half of the war, but she cannot remember.)

She manages to calm herself with breathing exercises, some of her coping mechanisms, until she’s not shaking -- and if he thinks his reassurances did it then all the better.

She insists on going with him to get his school books, the following summer. And when McGonagall -- the escort who had come to help Henry -- asks why. Hermione looks up at her favorite teacher (previously favorite teacher?) and scoffs. “If Henry is a wizard then I’m a witch and I wanna get some books so I can be ready.”

Her parents laugh, lightly, but McGonagall inclines her head and Hermione gets to go to Diagon Alley.

She’s now allowed to get anything too exciting, from the bookshop, but now that her brother has a wand she thinks she might be able to copy some of his textbooks into blank notebooks when no one is watching.

And if that’s what she has to do for the next three years until she follows him -- then that’s what she’ll do.

***

“Do you think she’ll be a Higgledypiggle, like you?” their father asks over breakfast, the day before her second first day, sending a wink her way.

She giggles, as expected, as Henry groans. “It’s _Hufflepuff_ dad, and no.”

Hermione blinks and looks at her brother, because she’d thought -- but no, it doesn’t matter what she’d thought. “You don’t?” She asks, voice small.

And he immediately reaches over and pulls her chair closer to his so he can ruffle her hair. “You’re the brainy one, you’re going to be a Ravenclaw, idiot.”

“I’m not an idiot, git!” she shoots back and elbows him as hard as she can.

“Watch the language please,” their mother scolds, and the breakfast scuffle subsides.

But she thinks about it, after that. She’d thought that she could probably convince the hat to place her in Hufflepuff. Sure, it had never been one of the choices offered to her the first time -- she knew she was loyal and hardworking, and besides, Helga had made a house that would accept anyone, hadn’t she? So she’d accept Hermione as well. She wanted to be a Hufflepuff, it sounded...nice.

And also she was fairly sure the ghosts of her past-in the future life would haunt her in Gryffindor, and she didn’t think she could survive that.

***

She hasn’t considered how hard it could be, to be back at Hogwarts. She’s either had eleven years to get over the trauma of the event that killed her -- that she died for -- or maybe she will have nineteen years.

Time travel is confusing.

She’s come to grips with it being the sixties -- well, the seventies now -- but she hasn’t really thought about how to come to grips with knowing that Lavender was laid to rest there -- torn apart by a werewolf -- or that Colin died there -- or that the wall, just there, was the one that killed Fred. Or will be laid to rest, will die, will kill -- because none of them are even born yet and how can they be dead if they haven’t been born.

She’s glad she came up in the boats. The carriages and the thestrals would’ve been too much for her, she knows -- she’s not sure if she would be able to see them. These eyes have never seen death, but it haunts her nightmares regardless.

She’s not sure if it would be better, or worse, to not see the thestrals -- and she’s glad she has a year to worry about that before it comes.

Well, a year if she very carefully avoids any of the Hogsmeade days, not that she’ll be allowed to go down yet, but the carriages come up to the front of the castle.

Hermione has had a variety of panic attacks, now, over her two lifetimes -- is she eleven or is she twenty-nine? Does it matter? And she can be grateful that the one she has now is more like a daze than the sort that leaves her sobbing in a corner (she’d set birds at a Death Eater in that corner, one she hadn’t recognized, but she’s fairly sure they had died with their eyeballs pecked out.)

Luckily the rest of the first years are anxious too -- if for completely different reasons. She can hear a few discussing what they have to do, to chose their houses, but she just fixes her gaze in the middle distance and tries not to panic.

She repeats her name, to herself, she repeats the year, she repeats the facts that are correct _right now_ , not the ones that will be correct in nineteen years when she first stepped foot here to be sorted. It’s the seventies and there was no battle at Hogwarts in the seventies. She can handle this. Except she hasn’t really considered what the exact year -- 1971 means until she’s standing waiting to be sorted and McGonagall calls “Black, Sirius.”

Ice fills her veins and her vision starts to tunnel and, “Are you alright?” asks the boy who’s standing next to her who she hadn’t even looked at until just now and -- “Evans, Lily.” McGonagall calls and she grips the shoulder of her future professor and wants to _cry_.

“Don’t like crowds,” she manages, which is an awful excuse because they’ve been standing here for a while and it’s not like the station and train itself weren’t crowded but -- but Remus Lupin has always been kind, and he just tries to block her view of everyone and murmurs nonsense to her.

“Lupin, Remus,” comes far too quickly, and she releases her grip on his shoulder before he’s even said he has to go -- but he doesn’t seem to notice, his own nerves setting in now that he has to walk to the hat.

She had an entire plan for telling the Sorting Hat to put her in Hufflepuff -- but she’s forgotten all of it and all she knows is that she _cannot_ go into Gryffindor.

She hears her name called -- “Mores, Hermione.” -- so Henry must’ve had a word with the professors that she didn’t like Virginia, or maybe McGonagall remembered from her first trip to the Mores -- they hadn’t needed a second as Henry had been her chaperone to Diagon. And she makes her way to the stool on shaky legs.

“ _Ravenclaw, Ravenclaw, Ravenclaw,”_ is all she can think, and if the Hat tries to speak to her she doesn’t hear it -- but she does hear it yell out “Ravenclaw!” and she jumps off the stool like it’s bitten her and drops the hat and heads straight to the blue table. At Hufflepuff she can see her brother standing and whistling, and that makes some of the ice melt and she smiles at him as brightly as she can, before she’s being tucked into a seat and a prefect is patting her shoulder.

Henry hops off the Hufflepuff bench as soon as the speeches are done, and makes his way right to her.

She can breathe a little easier once he’s pulled her into a hug and ruffled her hair. “I knew you’d be a ‘claw!” he says, and she focuses on him and not on anything else. “You’re going to be brilliant!” She tries to smile, tries to muster some excitement, but all she can see is broken masonry and she’s fighting the urge to just apparate him away from here _right now_ to somewhere safe because it’s certainly not safe here.

“Alright?” he asks, after a moment and she thinks that probably means that her face hasn’t managed to pass muster.

She pushes his arm off her shoulder and huffs, trying to remember how to be a little sister and not just a soldier. “I’m not a baby, Henry, I’ll be _fine_. Now go away!”

He laughs and ruffles her hair again -- which she hates, and this time she manages to slap at him appropriately -- before he steals her dinner roll and heads back to his table.

None of her new housemates comment.

***

Ravenclaw isn’t Gryffindor. Which she knew -- that was, after all, rather the point. But somehow she has still been expecting something similar.

But it’s not.

The memories she has of Gryffindor are rose colored and warm, now, she thinks -- because she knows that until the Troll in first year (and she always capitalizes the Troll in her mind) she didn’t have any friends and, in fact, had a fair bit of bullying directed her way. Actually, even after the Troll she had a fair bit of bullying throughout the years, but it was easier when she also had her friends at her side.

Ravenclaw isn’t warm. Oh, it’s not cold -- and she remembers that it could be worse. Didn’t her own house prank Luna something awful? Stealing her shoes and what not? They aren’t doing that to her.

No one is mean to her, but no one is particularly friendly either.

And she thinks that if this were her first, first year, and not her second, first year -- if her hand was in the air with every question then they’d probably be saying awful things about her. But she doesn’t think any would fight a troll for her.

But it’s not her first, first year. It’s her second, first year and she has goals. So she shoves the hurt away, because it doesn’t matter. She’s not here to make friends -- she’ll never be able to make friends again who would die for her, she knows. She’s not that lucky.

(And some part of her might be glad of it -- glad that she’s not going to face each year almost dying -- but that makes guilt well up in her throat until she can’t breathe, so she’s not allowed to think about that.)

***

Lupin -- Remus greets her shyly as they’re walking into the Charms classroom for their first class. The Gryffindors and Ravenclaws have double Charms -- Charms and History of Magic are the only two classes she’ll share with the Gryffindors, which is good.

She’s not sure what to do with the greeting, but she smiles at him and nods. She doesn’t want to hurt him, but she can’t be his friend. Acquaintance, she thinks, she can probably manage acquaintance.

She doesn’t have time for friends.

She’s already borrowed a copy of the Defense Against the Dark Arts book from each of the years -- she’s well familiar with the curse on the position, and she’s unwilling to wager that all of the teachers in the seventies had the good sense to provide good instruction, so she’s going to copy each of the textbooks every year so that she can learn _everything._

It’s so that she can actually get an O on her Defense OWL.

No other reason.

She’s definitely not lying to herself.

So she smiles at Remus, but takes a seat with a Ravenclaw and not with him, only slightly curious when he sits with one of the girl Gryffindors at the desk right in front of her and not with any of the three who will, she knows, be his best friends. At least, until they die, or betray him, or go to Azkaban.

He’d died, she knows, in the battle. She’d seen both his body and that of Tonks before her death-not death.

She doesn’t wonder if, somewhere in the future, little Teddy Lupin is growing up without anyone.

Her teeth grind together and her first parents would’ve lectured her about it -- and slowly she realizes that Professor Flitwick is done with his instructions and they’ve started the practical part of the lesson.

She glares at the feather that’s been placed before her.

Her desk mate is swish-flicking her wand and saying the words correctly, and it’s not working for her.

She’s not going to be the first that does it -- but, she supposes, she has to look like she’s trying. So with a deep breath she takes her wand -- not the same wand, not at all, not even the same core and she wonders if like being sorted into houses they’re also given their wands too young, or maybe her real wand was her first wand but it doesn't even _exist_ yet, just like she shouldn’t exist and --

The thoughts and emotions are forced out with an exhale, and she purposely mispronounces the spell. She chooses not to think of Ron when she does it, because she doesn’t want to have a nervous breakdown in her first week of classes. Closer to finals it may be acceptable, she thinks, and wonders if she should worry that she’s mentally penciling in when to have public emotional breakdowns.

Her desk mate doesn’t comment, even as she mispronounces it _again_ , even while the other girl is pronouncing it correctly. She’s also not putting any magic into her flick and swish, just in case, and she wonders if she even realized that she could just _not_ when she was a first year. No, she thinks, that was a later lesson, wasn’t it? To teach them how to practice spells that might do damage before you were ready.

One of the other Ravenclaws gets their feather to float a tiny bit for a moment, and starts to gloat, and Hermione wants to scoff even as her house is given five points. It seems that the application of points, and some hidden house pride, maybe, finally causes her desk mate to quietly correct Hermione’s pronunciation.

Hermione inclines her head, and starts to use the correct pronunciation, even while holding her magic back from lifting her feather.

She’s not here to be a show off, just like she’s not here to make friends. She’s here to fade into the background, to learn all she can, to keep her brother safe...and to destroy horcruxes.

Swish and flick.

**Author's Note:**

> Again, this is getting a second half, no promises on it being good tho, or soon. 
> 
> Questions, concerns, just wanna talk? Find me [on tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/capriciouswrites), and let me love you.


End file.
